Almost home
by MissRed666
Summary: Voyager meets a spectacularly cruel race, with a way to get them home in minutes. J/C as always. I don't own the characters, I just enjoy playing with them and your emotions :D Enjoy. ATM it is T but this may change as I get further into the story.


She was lying on the floor in her quarters. Just lying, staring up as the stars flying by. She had moved her bed so that she could lie on the ground rather than her soft Starfleet bed. Today was a day that she wanted people to vanish into thin air, she couldn't take it anymore and worse than that she didn't want to anymore. After the day she had had, she had retired from the bridge and almost ran back to her rooms. The minute she was clear of the door she locked it and striped off her uniform, unceremoniously tearing it to pieces and dropping them on the floor. Tearing up her uniform didn't do enough for her today, she swept everything from her desk and ransacked her quarters, finally pulling her bed out into the main room and collapsed on the floor in the middle of her bedroom. Deeply breathing, desperately trying to catch her breath she lay looking out the view port on her ceiling. Today she had almost abandoned her principles, and for most of the day she actually wanted to. Voyager had met an alien species earlier in the week and she found out two days ago that they had technology that had the ability to send them home in a heartbeat. Of course she had requested the device, and unlike every other species they had encountered this lot was actually willing to help. They had conditions, Voyager couldn't keep the device once they got home. So Janeway and the aliens came up with a solution to that problem, the device would be installed on Voyager and one of the alien ships would be tractored with Voyager to the Alpha Quadrant, when they arrived home the aliens would remove the device and return home, which to Janeway was a perfectly acceptable compromise. She had ordered her engineering crew out and the aliens went to work, Janeway wasn't an idiot, she had B'elanna watching all of the systems in engineering just in case something went wrong and she had transporter locks on all of the visitors. She had hoped that she wouldn't have any need for any of these contingencies. But of course this was the delta quadrant and nothing is as it seems, within hours B'elanna started to notice odd energy reading emanating from the device the aliens were installing. Once Janeway was told, she ordered detailed sensor sweeps. These revealed nothing out of the ordinary. B'elanna wasn't convinced that these aliens we truly trying to help them so over the next two days she did everything she could to find out how the device in engineering worked. When she found out she was physically sick, practically ran to the bridge to report what she found. Janeway could still hear her voice as clearly as she was still speaking:

"Captain!" B'elanna shouted as she burst onto the bridge practically running over an ensign just coming off his shift.

"B'elanna, what is the matter? I expect a little bit of proprietary on my Bridge!" Janeway said indignantly, this may have been the delta quadrant but this was still a federation ship.

"I'm sorry, but I found out how their device works." At this Janeway stood

"You did what!"

"I know but I was concerned, and damn rightly so! These things, they don't use a energy source 'we wouldn't understand', I understand perfectly. They are utilising a life form that can shift from a state of pure energy to a being of matter. Which was why we couldn't detect it on sensors, we had scanned it whilst it was energy."

Janeway, if it was possible, become more furious.

"They are killing them Captain, they are torturing them!"

Pressing her com badge Janeway spoke to the head of the alien engineering team

"Janeway to Engineering."

"Engineering here Captain, what can we do for you? The device will not be fully powered for another sixteen hours."

"Could you please report to me ready room." She replied with a serene sort of calm, that the crew had come to expect of her when she was beyond furious.

"Sure thing Captain."

=A=

"Is what she says true?" she demanded of the being in front of her, they were so remarkably like humans it was almost impossible to tell them apart from others of her own species.

"No." he said simply.

"No?" she inquired, barely trying to keep the anger from her voice. She and seen B'elanna's findings she was telling the truth.

"Yes, these 'beings' are not living, they have no conscious life. They cannot reproduce independently they cannot heal themselves and they are not even in a state of matter for any long period of time."

"But they are conscious, for brief periods of time?"

"Well in a sense yes but.." B'elanna didn't let him finish,

"They were screaming! You were there I saw you, they we in pain! You were killing them, they even said so themselves. Captain.." she shouted angrily at the alien

"B'elanna, you are dismissed." Janeway said evenly, she knew exactly what B'elanna want to really say to the man because she was thinking it herself.

"Thankyou Captain, that woman is so implosive, rattling on about what she doesn't understand…" he went to continue but Janeway held her hand up to cut him off.

"I need some time to discuss this matter with the rest of my senior staff, but for now until further tests can be done to determine if these beings are living I want your teams to stop work." He opened his mouth but she continued, "I don't want to hear it, I want you to stop right not. Dismissed"

The alien regarded her heavily and left the room. When he was gone Janeway hung her head in her hands. Sometimes she just couldn't solve every problem and this was a huge one. Could she in good faith let her crew get home at the cost of these creatures, if they even were alive? She knew what she had to do but she also knew that the pull of home was very strong especially in her mind. She was torn, for the first time she was honestly considering murdering these creatures that weren't alive but still conscious just to get her crew home. She needed some clarity, so she called a meeting for the senior staff.

TBC


End file.
